Romano-British Art.
Many readers in searching for curios of the Romano-British period in this country will recall the fact that the ancient Britons possessed bronze; and doubtless we should be doing an injustice to the more enlightened dwellers in Britain before Roman occupation, and contemporary with it, if we did not admit that possibly some of the relics of that period now dubbed Roman belonged to those more entitled to our regard, for Albion was their native land.
On the Thames Embankment, facing the Houses of Parliament, there is that famous bronze group perpetuating the memory of the British Queen Boadicea in her war chariot. The Romans made their famous paved roads as they pushed their outposts and line of camps farther north and west. The wheels of many British war chariots were made of, or hooped with, brass, and possibly the brass or bronze wheels, such as are represented in that group on the Embankment once covered by the flowing river, may have rattled over the roads made by the conquerors; such chariots, with their appointments of bronze and ornamental horse trappings, showed much skill in their fashioning. A poet gives voice to their use in the following lines:
"On the bright axle turns the bidden wheel
Of sounding brass, the polish'd axle steel."